Paranoid...or Perceptive?
Cox Communications is my internet service provider (as well as my cable company). When I first signed up for their internet service a few years ago, I was amazed at the blazing speed of the connection. Not anymore; something has changed between then and now, and it's not a good change.
At the time I signed up, I was assured that service would never slow down due to increased subscribers on my "node" (my made-up word...I'm not sure what the technical term is for our little part of the network). This is supposedly the Achille's Heel of cable internet connections; the more people in your neighborhood who use the service, the slower it gets. The Cox rep assured me that Cox would stay ahead of the curve and keep adding capacity so we would never notice any such slowdowns.
I'm sure they would never knowingly fib to me...would they? So, what's causing the slowdowns? I really hope it's the increased subscriber load, because the alternative is just sickening.
Cox now sells a "Premier Package" for its "High Speed Internet" customers. For about twice the price, you get speeds "up to 30% faster" than what most of us subscribed to. See where I'm going with this?
What's the best way to get people to upgrade their accounts to faster speeds? Well, one way to do it is to slow down their current accounts. Is this possible? Beats me. All I know is that my connection is noticeably slower, day in and day out (regardless of the time of the day) than it was three years ago. I'd be very interested to hear if other Cox customers are experiencing the same phenomenon.
To answer your rhetorical question, I'd go with your perennially proven perception before any possible paranoia.
Posted by: Jasmine at April 26, 2004 10:51 PMI don't know about Cox, but I can tell you that it's definitely possible to slow your lame non-Premier bohunkus down. It's called Quality of Service, and it's dead easy in the infrastructure behind that cable modem of yours. In fact, that infrastructure was designed to do just what you're talking about.
I'm not sure what you could do about it, short of showing them downward-trending performance graphs from three years ago compared to today. Alongside their written promise to "stay ahed of the curve", natch.
And even then they will likely have an incomprehensible technical answer for you. I would be happy to parse it, should it come to pass.
Posted by: Scott Chaffin at April 27, 2004 12:09 AMEric, have noticed the same thing here, at home, where we subscribe to Cox. It's also where I get part of my work done - site editing, breaking news, etc. - so it's slowing business, for me, as well as other things one does on the net.
Posted by: Jeff at April 27, 2004 07:33 AMEric: I had to drop TWC/RoadRunner in my neighborhood because their infrastructure was having problems (router issues they could never fix). I know it was a router issue because of line latency tests I could run from dsl reports, and ping plotter tests I ran.
I don't know if PingPlotter still offers a free trial version, but if so you might want to download it and run it for a few days to see if there are any particular trouble spots (www.pingplotter.com). Also, use the line latency tests at DSLreports.com. The TWC/RR people found the info I obtained useful, they just never could get my #@$% connection stable (hence DSL).
Interestingly, I have a neighbor running an open wi-fi connection on TWC/RR these days. I may run some tests on the connection, and see if they've solved their probs in our neighborhood. It was somewhat cheaper than my DSL.
Yes, I'm a geek. :)
Posted by: kevin whited at April 27, 2004 09:02 AMAlongside their written promise
Yeah, righhhhhhhhtttttt.... ;-)
Jeff...I feel your pain. When my internet connection doesn't work, I don't get paid. It's that simple.
Posted by: Eric at April 27, 2004 10:20 PMThere is a good chance that your modem has been capped. ATTBI did the same thing to me. I joined them about a week before they merged with @home, and I had a smoking 4mbit connection. Merger happened -- BAM: 1.5mbps cap. Later, Comcast bought them, and they loosened the cap up to 2.4 and then 3mbps. The upload is capped at 256kbps (up from 128kbps) still, and that is where the "premier account" comes in for Comcast -- raising the upload cap.
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Our household certainly has noticed a slowdown! And inexplicable interruptions in service as well! I was irritated by the advertisement for faster service.
Posted by: Jasmine at April 26, 2004 10:49 PM